The Aesthetics of Awkwardness features disabled dancer and choreographer Bill Shannon, who uses crutches and skateboards in his work, in collaboration with Oakland's Axis Dance Company, many of whose members are disabled. Together, they stretch even the expansive definition of modern dance. Shannon's solo piece, "Regarding the Fall," and an unnamed trio for himself, Nicole Richter, and Judith Smith depict the experience many people have with limitation -- but they're not just depicting it. Moving on crutches and in wheelchairs, the dancers convert a common feeling of hapless awkwardness into flesh, a state of being.
"Regarding the Fall" begins with Shannon on crutches, struggling to open one of the glass doors of the center. (The show was held in the center's forum, the wheelchair-accessible lecture hall.) His silvery suit and the enormous Army-green helmet covering his face transform the buffed dancer into an astronaut-emulating geek. A metal leg brace slung over his shoulder bangs against his back, and his legs wind like vines around his crutches' lower rungs. Shannon hobbles slowly to center stage, grunting with effort, and crashes to the floor. The room blacks out.
When the lights come up, he is helmet-free and removing his jacket. The back of his T-shirt reads "Faker," a moniker that soon explains itself as he skims along, on crutches and legs, as smooth as a hockey player. After a couple of laps around the room, Shannon returns to center, where he uses his crutches as a base for hip-hop jigs and gymnastic swings.
"Regarding the Fall," moving from awkwardness to elegance -- from a "handicapped" person's presumed limitations to a surprising range of motion and expression --- seems to be heading for a soaring climax. But in fact, Shannon's vision is darker than that: In the end, his movement carries the shadow of pre-Fallen difficulties. He turns away from us and limps offstagein semidarkness.
Is Shannon tired as he leaves or is he just performing "tired"? Has he made an artistic choice or is he dogged by physical necessity? As audience members, we get to choose how we think about disabled dancers and what they can and cannot do, but the dancers' choices with regard to their bodies are limited. The Aesthetics of Awkwardness escapes the sense of tragedy that tends to accompany physical disability: It calls attention not just to the dancers' reflexes but to the audience's. At one point in the trio, for example, Shannon moves over to Richter -- flopped forward from her waist, like a rag doll -- to help her up. But he stumbles as he reaches for her. She works to help him up, and falls down. Their struggle -- crutches, legs, and arms moving in a futile frenzy -- becomes a tango, where dancing and intimacy and entanglement and immobilizing someone with good intentions slide together into one.
-- Apollinaire Scherr
Floggin' Funny
Wm. Floggin' Buckley. Written and performed by John Mendelssohn. At Teatro v. Wade, 50 Oak (at Van Ness), through April 25. Call 972-8027.
In what may be the city's smallest theater space, on the second floor of a grand old building near Market Street with copper ornamentation and marble steps, a man who used to be a critic for Rolling Stone and a sometime musician in his own right is giving a monologue about his brief and painful experience working for Larry Flynt. It's called, for no clear reason, Wm. Floggin' Buckley. The title derives from an offhand comment by one of the characters, a British editor named Rupert. "I didn't say we needed William Floggin' Buckley, did I?" he screams at one point; but since it's Rupert's habit to use the word "flogging" every time he means "fucking," the monologue could just as comfortably be called "Jesus Floggin' Christ." It really, profoundly doesn't matter -- especially not to the author -- and this sense of abdication flaws what's otherwise a very funny show.
Back in the day, John Mendelssohn pissed off readers at Rolling Stone by twitting Led Zeppelin and touting the Kinks. The show is about one of his later journalistic stints. He starts with a withering skit about a job interview and then segues into a coolly delivered story about one item on his resume. "Hammond Palmer Publishing" is the thin fictional cover for Larry Flynt Publications, and what sounds at first like a digression from the interview turns into a well-controlled stream of narration and acted-out characters. It's fluent, fast, roundabout, and disgusting. Mendelssohn casually notes the lack of "women with open labia" in the waiting room of Hammond Palmer and says the offices are about as "erotic as a savings and loan. ... These were the same people you'd see at your bank or, a couple of years later, at a Whitney Houston concert." But that's just his first impression. He goes on to describe a staff of people who wouldn't be out of place on the cover of Dylan's The Basement Tapes. Rupert is a flaming asshole of a boss; Sylvia is the oversexed Southern sister of the owner's wife; and then there's the wheelchair-bound Mr. Palmer himself (Larry Flynt), with "little piggy eyes" and pink skin. Mendelssohn throws himself into all these characters, and if the story is hard to follow it never lacks crazed energy or color.
But it ends abruptly. When the irate father of a 15-year-old model locks himself with two hostages in an office at HPP, and gets arrested by cops who don't even seem interested in the idea that a 15-year-old girl might have been posing for Larry Flynt, you start to believe the story is going somewhere; but the narrative trickles out and never rounds back to the job interview. This makes the whole thing feel as arbitrary as the title. Apparently Mendelssohn has done a version of this show before; two years ago it was called I, Caramba, after his written autobiography. Why "Buckley" and not "Caramba"? Why anything? Well, it's funny, at least, even if it feels like the author gave up on his story four-fifths of the way through.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Go to Work
Working Women Festival. By various artists. At the 450 Geary Studio, 450 Geary (at Mason), March 7-29. Call 567-6088.
A random sampling of plays from the fourth annual Working Women Festival last month turned up an equal share of cliches and excellent work, sometimes within the same show. One example was the West Coast premiere of Donald Margulies' July 7, 1994, which presented a day in the life of a doctor in an urban clinic, suffering through everyone else's pain while her Ph.D.-student husband stays home with their baby. The concept alone is already a cliche-of-the-decade, but some of the scenes had real feeling. Michele Groves brilliantly played an AIDS patient who first couldn't listen to the news that her drug treatments weren't working and then got mad at the doctor, Kate, who unfortunately could only ply her with advice that sounded like dialogue from a public service announcement. ("I'm just saying that maybe we should think about the future" -- euphemistic advice to a dying woman.) And Ian Hirsch was good as a wheedling, churlish, jittery sexist who flirted with Kate and eventually pulled down his pants so she could look at his penis. (Kate's disappointing dialogue: "Do you have any idea how inappropriate your behavior is?" -- duh -- and, "Mr. Caridi, have you been taking your lithium?") Other scenes, like a racially charged conversation about O.J. Simpson, felt rote and tired; but the show was saved by a simple and nicely felt coda showing Kate reacting to her day.
More earnest and less honest was a short drama called No Exile, about a family in Nazi Germany. Ingeborg Weinmann apparently interviewed her own relatives to write a portrait of bigotry and denial under Hitler, but an understandable reflex to apologize for her family's past sentimentalized what could have been a stirring show. Miriam Babin played an excellent grandmother, a doughty old German with sharp things to say about her goose-stepping husband and homeland; during the play you learned that this charming woman was also an ugly conformist under the Nazi regime. This was powerful, but the songs Weinmann wrote and sang for the story were not, and the piece crumbled into something that tried very hard to be stark. I'm also descended from ordinary Germans who conformed under Hitler, so I know something about dealing with this past, and I think emotionally correct sentiment becomes the easiest barrier to cold-eyed, painful honesty.
Then there was Innocent Heat, a campy staging of a pulp novel with the same title by Seattle's Pulp Vixens. The story followed Doris and Midge from their first sweaty high school lesbian gropings to a stormy relationship in New York after college. It was pure cliche, but that was the point: Jennifer Jasper and Mia Levine clownishly played out the story while Shawn Yates, as a primly curious woman named Catherine, read aloud from the book. Doris became a publishing executive after college; Midge dropped out to become an elevator operator, coming home every night sick to death of "riding up and down that greasy shaft all day." The show was witty, hysterical, over-the-top, and shamefully underattended. It ended with a smarmy lounge song by Catherine, who entered her own pulp novel and went to jail with the characters, coming out (in every sense) transformed.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Wim and Vigor
Seven for a Secret Never to Be Told. Choreographed and performed by Wim Vandekeybus and Ultima Vez. At Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard (at Third Street), March 25-29. Call 392-4400.
It's steeped in superstition, but Wim Vandekeybus' evening-length dance Seven for a Secret Never to Be Told feels most like a fantastical and terrifying trip through the surreal realm of the subconscious. The Belgian choreographer wove this wildly theatrical work together in seven overlapping sections, based on an Irish rhyme: "One for sorrow, two for joy/ Three for a girl, four for a boy/ Five for silver, six for gold/ Seven for a secret never to be told." It's about the fortune you get based on how many magpies you see; Vandekeybus uses the rhyme to explore how people try to maintain control, over themselves and others, and over things they really can't control.
The magpies are tricksters and ringmasters, enigmas and hit men; they set the action in motion and then watch it spiral into chaos. Tension underscores the most abandoned dancing in the same way that lingering fears pervade otherwise rational thinking. The first bird, danced weightlessly by Carlo de Haro Flores, pecks at a woman lying in a dimly lit clearing. Dancer John Campbell rushes in shouting and clapping his hands to scare the bird away, but succumbs to his own curiosity and begins questioning the wary animal, keeping just enough distance not to frighten it away. This section is "sorrow," and its pace picks up quickly, with dancers creeping onstage back-first as bird, man, and woman go flying across the stage in an intense struggle for power. "Sorrow" bleeds into "joy" after a tense moment when the magpie climbs into a giant wooden box, and, after the roar of what sounds like an incinerator, emerges as two birds. The choreographer's vision of joy is one part seedy French cabaret, another part Beatrix Potter: The birds, armed with a microphone and an entertainer's spiel about making people happy and helping them change, lock one dancer after another in the box to the unnerving hissing of a fire. One dancer re-emerges as a nattily dressed frog, the next as a giant sausage. When Campbell's turn comes, he steps into the box and steps out as ... himself, with no visible changes. It is simultaneously anticlimactic and reassuring.
The visual theatricality for which Vandekeybus is best known links sections together with striking subtlety. The boys' and girls' sections are bridged by a scuffle in which a man is wrestled to the ground and systematically stripped of his clothing, down to his sparkling gold shoes. When the boys meet the girls the dancing becomes more heated and reckless, with heart-stopping headlong dives and listless tangos, and men wrapping supporting arms around the women's shoulders and cradling exposed necks in the crooks of their arms.
When Vandekeybus isn't suspending his dancers over hundreds of real eggs or tangling them up in ropes, he's creating dance with a violent edge. His dancers roll out their own personal carpets across the stage with their feet and take turns jerking themselves around like hapless puppets to Pierre Verloesem's clanging industrial score. Relationships between the sexes are at once essential and cruel: The sound of searing flesh erupts in "gold" every time Campbell touches Lieve Meeussen. The magpie takes a human form at the end, and evokes the secret of the title by swinging a microphone in circles like a whistling whip and smacking people in his path with an amplified thunk. When the curtain falls, we are no closer to knowing the secret than we were when it rose, but like the best children's books, Vandekeybus has shown us whimsy and sorrow and danger in a world that is ultimately no stranger than our own.
-- Heather Wisner
Bigmouth Strikes Again
I'm Still Here ... Damn it! Written and performed by Sandra Bernhard. Musical direction and keyboards by Mitch Kaplan. Percussion by Denise Frazier. At the Alcazar Theater, 650 Geary (at Jones), through April 4. Call (510) 762-2277.
"I am an actress. I am a performah. I am a superstar!" The crowd roars and Sandra Bernhard raises her arms like a drag-queen messiah, all fabulousness and mock ego. In her new show, I'm Still Here ... Damn It! -- with a long, red, skintight dress showing off her pregnant tummy -- she brings together a peculiar confluence of genres and cultures while reciting poetry, cracking jokes, bantering with the audience, and singing songs, mostly pop-schlock classics from the '70s and '80s but also odd stuff like a take on a Muslim call-to-prayer song. The good news is that she is the whole show. The bad news is that she is, well, the whole show.
Caustic, energetic, witty, and self-obsessed, Bernhard embodies Los Angeles' spectacle of desire. She's at once transfixed by fame, celebrity, and glamour and she's smart enough to know how tacky these compulsions are. "I look at all the pretty clothes and pretty things that people have given me and I feel like I'm a lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky girl," she says. "Though I wouldn't want to rub your noses in it." She flaunts her glamour and power over "the little people" even as she ridicules her own unctuous hunger to be part of the celebrity in-crowd -- waiting for hours, for example, in a hotel room for Courtney Love to return her call. In a particularly savage riff on the sanctimoniousness of celebrity mourning she sings a disco tune purportedly written by Naomi Campbell for Gianni Versace. But in this song, as elsewhere in the musical segments that dot the show, she may begin with a sense of irony but she invariably seems to get caught up in the spectacle of her performance -- thereby losing track of the humor. The songs afford her most sincere moments, but they are almost always framed as a joke.
In this way, Bernhard traffics in the sort of postmodern ambiguity that makes a lot of old-school cultural commentators go apeshit, but for me her shtick is just that -- the unprocessed dreck of an unusually witty, gifted woman. Bernhard likes to strut her stuff and can belt out a tune like a regular (or irregular) Babs, but when she takes on "Little Red Corvette," what does one make of it? It doesn't inform her commentary, her bad poetry, or her stand-up bits; it's just what Bernhard wants to do. Critics have said this show is about celebrity, but that's not exactly true: It's about the obsessions of a woman who happens to be celebrity-struck. Content is irrelevant: It's all Sandra, all the time, and no one seems to mind. The packed house laughed, clapped, and cheered even when her intentions were utterly muddy. (Why, for example, were we treated to an entire version of Bernhard's rendition of Christine McVie's "Songbird"?)
In some ways, by taking her music so seriously and trying to show off her voice, Bernhard doesn't take advantage of her satirical opportunities. Her songs could be witty rewrites or performance parodies, but as it is, they reinforce the sneaking suspicion that this is all a capricious lark by a woman with more talent than she knows what to do with. "Maybe the show's about being yourself," my husband suggested as we left the theater. Indeed, Bernhard has been a courageously unabashed gay icon in Hollywood since the beginning of her solo career with her show Without You I'm Nothing, and with her groundbreaking gay character on Roseanne. Now, however, she's not such an anomaly; and an unadulterated fascination for glamour is, in the end, too thin a theme for an evening's performance, much less a life.
-- Carol Lloyd